INTRODUCTION
If The Agent Gambit is your first taste of the Liaden Universe®, welcome, and welcome to the club, because the two novels here effectively represent the way the authors came to the story.
At the time we wrote the first books in the series our lives revolved around cats, writing–and around chess–since Steve was President of the local chess club, a voting member of the United States Chess federation, and a working USCF tournament director. We sometimes couched our work in chessic terms, looking at variations of story ideas, using opening combinations of characters or ideas, and even as gambits–in chess, a kind of opening move or set of moves that has some risk and a lot of potential upside.
Our first intimation that there was a game afoot came back in 1985 or so when Sharon spent all day at the typewriter and came up with one sentence: The man who was not Terrence O’Grady had come quietly. Essentially a gambit: the story action is initially seen through the eyes of a minor character in the first short chapter, only getting to our protagonist’s view in the second chapter. If that opening didn’t grab the reader, they wouldn’t buy the book. Thankfully, readers liked it.
We’ve shared the follow-up story to that sentence appearing elsewhere any number of times, but essentially we took the next 24 hours off from the mundane world and, agreeing there was more than short story or novel in this sentence, charted out seven books. What most concerns us here is not all seven, but these two: Agent of Change and Carpe Diem.
Agent of Change was written first, and it embodied (we hoped!) the essentials as we saw them: action, adventure, romance, and honor. While we envisioned a spy story and a hero who might move at the highest levels, we only nodded in passing at what spy stories looked like in 1985–there were gadgets (we wanted a science fiction book, right?) and there were spaceships. And along with the spy story tropes and the regency romance tropes (for we were playing as well as writing!) there was also a mix of hints from the back story we knew and the front story we wanted to write. Those complexities came in part from the use of language (we hope you’ll be patient with adding a few words to your vocabulary) and from odd societies seen from the inside, where the reader once in awhile must take our word that this is how it works. Please enjoy, and understand that many of those little references to songs, or jokes, are on purpose.
We finished Agent of Change where it ends now, though the original opening chapter or two were edited and rewritten heavily once the book was sold. It took several years for the first Liaden novel to find a home, though, and in the interim, we went on, having left (as you first timers will discover) our two main characters in a bit of a pickle.
Going on was Carpe Diem, which is also in the book or file in front of you. Without putting too many spoilers into the intro, let us say that our main characters had thought themselves comfortable, and then discovered that they were not, and could not be, as things were developing. For one thing, they were located on a world far from where either of them wanted or needed to be. For another thing, there was the problem of having two strong-willed people with various sorts of battle trauma to deal with. We still played with words, added more about the rest of the clans and had fun.
Carpe Diem works with a number of our usual themes: honor, romance, adventure–but it also explores deeper questions–like how do soldiers break training and become human again, and what happens when man needing breakfast faces a broken toaster.
Baen will be releasing two more Liaden Universe® reprint omnibi: the previously mentioned Korval’s Game (including Plan B and I Dare) and The Crystal Variation (including Crystal Soldier, Crystal Dragon, and Balance of Trade). These next five novels are mostly adventure and Space Opera, with three of them following after the original seven-book story arc we’d started with. All are character-driven; all were fun to write and, we hope, fun to read.
In addition to the reprints which include the already issued The Dragon Variation, Baen has-or-will-be publishing four more Liaden Universe® novels: Fledgling, and Saltation, the story of Theo Waitley; and Mouse and Dragon, the sequel to Scout’s Progress, as well as Ghost Ship, the direct sequel to both I Dare and Saltation.
If this is your first encounter with a Liaden Universe® book— welcome. If you’re an old friend, stopping by for a revisit—we’re very glad to see you.
Thank you.
Sharon Lee and Steve Miller
Waterville Maine
September 2010